Since antiquity, common sense has customarily subscribed to a dualism between

the 'mental' versus the 'physical'the world of 'subjective thoughts in the mind'
versus the world of 'objective manifestations out there'. Under various labels,
'mentalism' and 'physicalism' have waged endless debates seeking to establish the
absolute predominance or superiority of the one world over the other, as if it were
somehow illegitimate or inadmissible to acknowledge their continual interaction in
human life. This forced choice has been a serious impediment to attaining a
reliable consensus about many human phenomena, including language.

Shelleys lines celebrate the alliance of literature and philosophy, as liberty

emerges from creative freedom and critical awareness. Yet, the form of the poem
tells us more, through figures, sonorities, and connotations. A chiasmus
promises speech to poetry and confers vision to philosophy, creating new
intersections between poetic and speculative faculties. Through the return of the
same plosives, fricatives, sibilants, and vocalic sounds from speechless child to
lidless eyes, the endeavor of philosophy resonates as a mere echo of the poetic
murmur. The forgotten connotations of the word strain surface, gliding from
effort to melody, whereby song surreptitiously invades the province of
speculation. Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies, Emily
Dickinson writes, intimating that truth is the province of literature as much as
it is the preserve of philosophy, but also indicating the slanting of thought as
the hallmark of literature, in an implicit contrast with the long chains of simple
and easy reasonings celebrated by Descartes as the geometrical model of
philosophical thinking. Here also, meaning resides and develops in poetic form. The
alliterative and incantatory rhythm of the first line turns the telling of truth into
a sacred errand for poetry, while the second line, conflating Success and
Circuit in quasi-paronomasia, modifies and almost reverses the initial claim by
playing on the dual meaning of the word lies, strategically placed in final position,
whose signifier inscribes falsehood at the very heart of poetic truthtelling, virtually
anticipating Gilles Deleuzes notion that art is the highest power of falsehood.

Not only does Romantic literature generate a form of thinking that articulates
major philosophical problems, it also, and more radically, thinks outside
philosophical discourse, subverting our conceptions of speculative thinking.

In the words of one of the contributors, the poetics of thinking in Romantic literature
is the dazzling and riotous irruption of unpreconceived, unannounced,
unthought thought, unraveling the architectonics of discourse and disrupting

the course of poetry, hollowing in its ground-breaking novelty, hollowing by force

and by necessity, in its re-foundation of the place of poetry and philosophy.

If you are going to reflect on your own writing, ask yourself questions about it, and
seek to improve it, then you will need a vocabulary, a set of terms, to enable you
to do that. The nub of syntax is the structure of the clause. Structural choices are
therefore important, because a grammatically well-crafted text will not only be more
effective as a piece of communication, but also be a pleasure to read. Grammatical
choices affect the meaning of the text. When you sit down to write a text, you may
have the impression that you are faced with unlimited choice. There are, of course,
the constraints imposed by the topic you are writing on, or the question that you
are supposed to be answering; but that is more likely to constrain your choice of
vocabulary, rather than your choice of grammar.

When we put sentences together into a paragraph or text, we need to pay particular
attention to the choice of elements to fill the initial and final slots of the sentence.
These positions in sentence structure have a particular significance in the
developing communication of a text. What a sentence starts with usually relates
back in some way to the previous sentence or sentences in the text, and it thus
serves to tie the present sentence into the text structure. It also represents the
theme or starting point of the sentence, what the sentence is about. The final
position in a sentence usually contains the most newsworthy element, and it thus
contributes to carrying forward the message of the text. Consideration of how you
distribute material within a sentence can contribute to success in getting your point
across. Since the initial and final elements in sentences are so important to
enabling the message of a text to be developed successfully, it is not surprising that
there are grammatical processes for rearranging the order of elements in a
sentence, in order to move elements to these initial and final positions.

The mechanisms for moving an element to the initial position of a sentence are
known as fronting. One way of fronting an element, which we have considered
briefly already, is the passive construction. The basic form of a sentence is active:
the doer of an action is the subject of the sentence, and the victim is normally
the direct object. Another mechanism for fronting an element of a sentence and at
the same time giving it a measure of emphasis is the so-called cleft
construction. The cleft construction splits (cleaves) a sentence in two to provide
focus on a fronted element.

The mechanisms for moving an element to the end of a sentence are known as
postponement. The passive construction can be regarded as a mechanism for
postponement, as well as for fronting.

A more obvious and widespread case of postponement is extraposition (literally,

putting outside). It operates on sentences that have clauses as subject, for
example:
That the liquid in the test tube turned cloudy is surprising.
To classify diseases in this way is useful.
These sentences are unwieldy. In English, the longest element in a sentence tends
to go at the end, under the so-called principle of end-weight.
Extraposition supports this principle by filling initial position with a dummy it and
moving the subject clause to the end of the sentence:
It is surprising that the liquid in the test tube turned cloudy.
It is useful to classify diseases in this way.
The clauses that are usually subject to extraposition are that clauses and to
infinitive clauses . With seem as the main verb in the sentence, extraposition is
obligatory:
It seems that the chairman has decided to resign.
but not:
That the chairman has decided to resign seems.
Another way in which a long subject can be made shorter is by postponing part of it.
This can happen, for example, if the subject noun phrase contains a relative clause
or a comparative phrase or clause:
The family who had disappeared the previous week were found camping in Devon.
could become:
The family were found camping in Devon who had disappeared the previous week.
In which the relative clause who had disappeared the previous week is postponed to
the end of the sentence. Similarly:
Fewer road accidents have resulted in death or serious injury than last year.
has the postponement of the comparative phrase than last year from the subject:

Fewer road accidents than last year have resulted in death or serious injury.
These mechanisms for fronting and postponement demonstrate how sentence
elements can be moved around within sentences, especially to fill the important
initial and final positions.

The paragraph is a construct of written language. It does not occur in any

recognisable form in spoken discourse. Some linguists who have recently studied
spoken language in some detail would say the same about the sentence. But it is
arguable that sentence-like or clause-like structures are identifiable in spoken
language. The sentence remains a useful unit for describing the structural
relationships of grammar at this level (subject verb object, and so on), and it has
some correspondence to how we organise and express our thoughts.

There is no clear grammar of the paragraph as there is of the sentence. There is, in
general, no series of possible slots to be filled, as in a sentence; though the initial
and final sentences of a paragraph may be significant in the ongoing
communication of a text, just as the initial and final slots of a sentence are. In some
texts the structure may be more fixed; for example, in recipes there is usually a
paragraph for ingredients, followed by one for method of preparation. Some
forms of academic writing, similarly, have a set pattern: hypothesis, literature
review, method, results, interpretation, conclusion. But not all text types are so
prescribed.

There are two general principles that underlie effective writing:

1 accuracy in grammatical expression, punctuation and spelling, so that your
reader is not
distracted by any such mistakes
2 a style that is straightforward and easy to follow, and which does not
overburden the reader
with needing to guess at what you mean.

Writing is not like speech. When you are talking to another person in the give and
take of dialogue, you always have the possibility of seeking clarification, and you

often know the person you are talking to and so can guess at what they want to say.
In writing, you can usually make no assumptions about who might be reading
your composition, and they cannot ask you for immediate clarification if something
is obscure or ambiguous. As a writer, you need to do everything you can to make
sure that your reader will be able to understand your message without the
possibility of confusion or misinterpretation. In other words, you need to adhere to
the normal conventions of spelling, grammar and punctuation in order not to
obscure your message.

Priestley is one of the main codifiers of the English language and that as a
grammarian he had a profound influence on the standardisation of English in the
eighteenth century.

Spelling is the most standardised feature of the English language. The spelling of
English words has changed little since the eighteenth century; and, whatever accent
you may have, you are expected to spell in the same way as everyone else.
Because pronunciation has undergone a number of changes over the centuries and
there is no standard pronunciation, the relation between the pronunciation and
spelling of words has grown wider. Since the eighteenth century, correct spelling
has become a prime indicator of an educated person.

Being one of the great polymaths of the eighteenth century, like his mentor
Benjamin Franklin (17061790), Priestley features prominently in historiographies
and popular histories covering a variety of topics, chemistry, industry, philosophy,
politics and religion, some of which are specifically dedicated to his contributions in
these fields.